Robert Bosch

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

There's no car named for Robert Bosch. It doesn't matter, because Bosch is one of the most influential, important technical innovators in the history of wheeled transportation. The company he created is the world's largest automotive supplier.
Bosch was born in the Ulm administrative district of southern Germany in 1861. His family had mainly practiced farming there since the 1500s. Unusually for a farmer of that time and place, his father spent his scarce free time engrossed in books, and encouraged his children to do likewise. That led Bosch to a technical school in Ulm and a traditional apprenticeship as a precision mechanic. That personal education took him beyond Germany as a young man, to London and, in 1884, to New York City. Bosch was trained early as a maker of electrical instruments and, in the United States, worked with Sigmund Bergmann, a laboratory manager for Thomas Edison. Returning to Germany, Bosch opened his own workshop in Stuttgart.
Accounts of the day indicated that in the late 1880s, Bosch was early to embrace the velocipede. Slowly, Bosch began producing small items with vehicular potential such as gauges and switches. In 1887, a despairing engineer asked Bosch to produce a magneto, an electromechanical switch that could reliably produce a timed spark. Deutz, the manufacturer of petroleum-fueled engines, had been unable to make one that worked consistently. Experimentation yielded a successful prototype. By 1897, the magneto formed half of Bosch's output. That component is one of the most fundamental, important successes in motorcar history. Its first successful application was a De Dion-Bouton three-wheeler. It was a staggering technological advance. Bosch's brilliance became known to the world by the magneto's very early usage on racing cars, led by Marcel Renault and Camille Jenatzy.
Developing a successfully functioning ignition system was so critical that Bosch, the company, expanded internationally almost quicker than its products did. The solicitation of American business by Bosch sales engineer Gustav Klein resulted in U.S. factories being opened in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Plainfield, New Jersey, by 1914. Klein died in 1917, but that and subsequent trips ensured that most of Bosch's future growth came outside Germany.
This decentralization, coupled with the post-World War I economic collapse of Germany, accelerated the Bosch firm's reinvention as a network of independent, international subsidiaries stretching from Buenos Aires to Java. This established Bosch as an early, truly global industrial behemoth. Its contributions to automotive electronics are too numerous to list, but electronic fuel injection and antilock brake circuitry are among the most prominent.
Bosch was a social liberal who did much to establish the eight-hour workday in Germany, and later, was a prime antagonist of the Nazis. He died in 1942. Years after World War II, Bosch's handpicked successor, Hans Walz, accepted Israel's highest award in recognition for Bosch's having rescued Jews from Third Reich terror.

This article originally appeared in the February, 2010 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.